ChannelAdvisor

I’ll See Your Bid Rules, and Raise You an Additional Tool…

By now you’ve probably heard about enhanced CPC, or eCPC bidding from AdWords. You’re probably also completely confused by Conversion Optimizer, Automatic Bidding, CPC bidding, eCPC bidding, target CPO, max CPO and so on.

Being entirely retail focused, the ChannelAdvisor Paid Search team is always up for testing new bidding formats, especially when they play nicely with our own Bid Rules. 

So far we’ve seen very nice results from enhanced CPC bidding, which adjusts the CPC in real time, considering factors such as the users actual search query, location, time of day, etc.

For four large customers, average cost per acquisition has decreased 7%. Conversion rate has increased by 10.58% while overall conversions have increased by 1.8%. We’ve seen significantly better performance in US campaigns than in UK campaigns where we have seen an increase in cost per acquisition and a decrease in conversion rate.

We’ve seen eCPC work best on campaigns that were already pretty successful. By using ChannelAdvisor bid rules, we’ve refined our keyword list to favor those keywords that have a history of performing within our ROI goals. It’s like the extra vitamin supplement on top of an already good diet for our keywords.

To set up bid rules for your accounts, visit our SSC article here:

http://ssc.channeladvisor.com/howto/search-marketing/optimization/rules

After you’ve let our bid rules do the heavy lifting for several weeks, consider enabling Google’s Enhanced CPC bidding in your campaign settings:

Happy Bidding!

Blog post by Jackie Jenkins, Global Manager, Search Services

 

 

Cyber Monday Tip 7: Disable Google Ad Scheduling for the Holidays

Time is flying by—in just one week, a flood of shoppers will be browsing for the best deals of the year and filling up those virtual shopping carts. This week, we’re focusing on giving you tips that are especially actionable in the short-term to help you along the home stretch of Cyber Monday prep.

Tip #7: Disable Google Ad Scheduling

Google Ad Scheduling may be profitable to cut costs and impressions during off peak hours throughout the year, but the holiday season flips the “normal” online shopping timetable on its head, encouraging shopping at odd times of the day and increasing overall traffic.

Our suggestion: Disable or significantly scale back your Google Ad scheduling this year, especially during the Cyber 5.

During the holidays, and especially on Cyber Monday, online shopping turns into a 24-hour event, with folks rising as early as 4 and 5 a.m. and skipping lunch breaks to hit the Internet for gifts. Conversion rates will be significantly higher around the clock, so sticking to your non-holiday ad schedules could actually result in missed opportunities.

Bonus Holiday Paid Search Tip: If you haven’t already, resurrect paused seasonal keywords that have to do with holiday products, gifts and winter merchandise. Not sure what to bid up? Take a look back at your 2010 holiday campaign to see which keywords performed well. Remember, keywords that don’t convert in March or July can do wonders in November and December if they’re a holiday fit!

For more Paid Search Tips, read our white paper that helps you Solve the Top 5 Challenges to Sell More with Paid Search.

Also, make sure you don’t miss our past tips: 

Tip #1: Add Gift-Themed Categories

Tip #2: Offer and Highlight Free and Expedited Shipping

Tip #3: Bid Up Early and Often

Tip #4: Comply with Google Product Search Changes

Tip #5: Add Videos to Product Details

Tip#6: Touch Up Your Listings on Marketplaces

 Blog post by Natalie Sink, ChannelAdvisor Communications Assistant

Use Google Sitelinks To Improve CTR

Guess what? Google is testing again! Google started testing up to 6 sitelinks (in a Three-line format) in Ads at the beginning of September. Prior to September, Google was displaying up to 4 sitelinks (in Two-line format).

If you do not have sitelinks set up, we highly recommend adding these to your Brand campaign as it helps you direct your customers to a more valuable page. It also gives you more real estate on the page.

Especially with Holiday approaching, you can use sitelinks to call out Specials, Free Shipping, New Holiday Items In Stock, Black Friday Sale...the sky is the limit! This will help protect your campaign from a possible drop in position due to changing ads too much. For more information on that, see Google hates your new ads on this blog! Just be sure to remember to update these sitelinks post-season or post sale event. Nothing looks worse than an outdated ad, and the same applies to sitelinks.

Also, strategically choose the pages that you would like to highlight, do not just choose any ole link. You are trying to push your customers further down the purchase funnel so keep that in mind.

Why start with your brand campaign? Sitelinks are designed to appear in an ad when a search query is deemed highly relevant. For these instances, we have found that Brand terms are the most likely to trigger sitelinks.

Two-line formatted sitelinks have been proven to help increase CTR by an average of 17%, additionally, I have seen an 11% increase this month to date in my clients' brand campaign with Three-Line sitelinks appearing! 

According to Google, in order to help increase the likelihood of your sitelinks to appear:

• Your ads should have one of the top positions above the search results
• Your ads should have a very high quality score
• Your sitelink URLs must direct to pages that are part of your main website.

In Adwords:

• You may enter up to 10 direct links to pages on your site, Google will choose which of those to display depending on the query
• Click on the Ad Extensions tab, then View: Sitelinks Extensions
• Click +New Extension, Select your campaign, add your Link text and Destination URL and you are all set! (just remember in order to track performance/revenue in ChannelAdvisor, a tracking URL should be used as the destination URL)

In ChannelAdvisor:

• To generate a tracking URL from ChannelAdvisor, we recommend creating a dummy keyword in the respective Google campaign/ad group of your account
• For ex. [sitelink_tracking url]**www.yourdomain.com**.05, this will then bring any revenue attributed from an order placed on a sitelink into your appropriate campaign

One last tip, when creating your sitelink text, be brief! Short and sweet is key and the most successful.

For more information on Google Adwords, and how to get the most from your adspend, check out this ChannelAdvisor eBook: Take Google Adwords Reporting to the Next Level.

Post by Lori Prestipino, Paid Search Campaign Manager

 

Tis’ The Season….For Paid Search Sales

We’ve been talking about the holidays a lot lately.  Google is predicting nine $1 billion dollar sales days this year, and that’s huge for retailers.  Predicting this year’s trends can be tricky so let’s start with what we know.

Google insights are showing huge increases in keyword searches including terms like sale, coupon, promotion. Everyone is looking for a deal and hoping the internet turns holiday shopping into a giant clearance bin.

We also know that historical data tied to your AdWords ads plays a role in quality score and rank for both Google and Bing. 

So how do savvy marketers meet these savvy shoppers in the digital marketplace? We recently posted about how changes to ads can negatively impact CTR by resetting quality score and causing a drop in position. While this is normally short lived, we’ve also seen  a more lasting impact when changing ads in Trademarked Terms campaigns.

In short, there a few tricks to helping your promotions BE SEEN.

1. Set your ads to rotate evenly. Keep in mind the AdWords system will still favor the best performing ad based on CTR. This setting should be called “more evenly.”
2. Fold in promotional ads and allow them to get some history before pausing the standard ads.
3. As an additional catch all, consider putting your promotions in your site-links. In order to make sure they show, reduce the total number of sitelinks to six. Keep in mind that your ad’s average position needs to be in the top 1-2 spots reliably in order for sitelinks to show, so we recommend setting up sitelinks early on to make sure they are getting traffic. Also be aware that sometimes Google will only show 2 sitelinks so your promos may not always be getting traffic.

Additional tips on how to manage your campaigns for the holiday are available in the Paid Search Holiday Prep Boot Camp Webinar; more holiday tips to come, so stay tuned for an epic Q4!

Blog post by Jackie Jenkins, Global Manager, Search Services

 

Get Google ads reviewed faster, just in time for Q4!

Believe it or not we are just days away from entering the most wonderful time of the year, 4th Quarter!  Every retailer eagerly awaits the start like a 6-year-old on Christmas Eve, but with that comes planning and, of course, stress.

Google recently changed the way ads are reviewed, which can help substantially in the preparation for this lucrative time.  Earlier this month Google began reviewing not only active ads but paused ads.

So what does this mean to you?  Now, you can queue up ads for the holiday season, or really any sale you may run, in a paused state and get them through the approval process so that when you are ready to make them live you won't experience a delay.

As an added bonus, as a ChannelAdvisor customer you can use the Creative Upload Tool to upload the ads in bulk to Google and indicate "Paused" in the Status column. 



Once the ads are uploaded, check for disapproved ads by going to Paid Search>Campaigns>Creatives and use the Filter to search for "Rejected" ads. 

 

Then you can edit these ads as needed and re-upload.  Once the ads are approved, simply use the Creative Scheduling Tool to activate the creatives using the Creative ID and Status column.

 

 

Then set the time and date for the ads to go live on Google. 

 

 

You have enough to worry about during Q4.  Now, with the new Google ad approval process and ChannelAdvisor's Creative Upload Tools, you can have yourself a very Happy Holiday season!

 Blog post by Jennifer James, Paid Search Campaign Manager

Google Reveals Top Position Bid Estimates

This week, Google announced the addition of a new metric in AdWords called top of page bid estimates . Comparable to first page bid estimates, this will give advertisers an idea of what bid it would take to bring a specific keyword to the top positions over the organic search results.  Of course, CPC is only one factor in ad rank. Quality score and other factors such as budget, account settings and competition play a part, but this will certainly give advertisers a good idea of what to aim for in their bidding.

If you know that a keyword historically converts better in a top position, this could serve as a guide to where your keyword bid should be.

In a recent test for one of our clients, we decided to increase CPCs to push ads into a higher position for one of our top ad groups. As you can see in the graph below, over time we saw that as average position moved closer to the top 3, the higher visibility caused our click through rates to increase dramatically:

 

With the increase in CTR, we were getting much more traffic from the same impressions and our total conversions spiked:

 

Average CPC did increase, which increased our total cost, but the additional conversions were achieved within our ROI goals, so this strategy was very successful and profitable for this client. Try it out and let us know your results!

 

Written by Frank Andolina, Paid Search Campaign Manager II

Past Performance Predicts Proper Preparation

My mother is a bargain shopper who believes in shopping early and often. So, she has been busy preparing for this year's holidays for months now--or maybe she started last millennium. Either way, online retailers should follow her lead and be thinking ahead. Right now, if you haven't already, start mapping out a strategy to insure a successful Q4. You can now watch a recording of a recent webinar where I reviewed 2010 performance and provided a series of tips on how to maximize sales and achieve a great ROI. Or you can read this post and a series that will continue over the next couple of months, where I'll review last year's performance and provide tips for how to get ready for the holidays this year.

Get organized, stick to your plan, and be prepared to make adjustments.

Frankly, I’ve never been more excited about e-commerce than I am this year. The weak US economy does not change the fact that paid search continues to grow rapidly. In the UK, Europe, and Australia, we are seeing continued explosive growth in ecommerce and paid search. Nevertheless, taking advantage of this opportunity requires skill, perseverance and a focus on what matters.

As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” So, a historical review is imperative to building a foundation for success during the 2011 holidays.

At ChannelAdvisor, we pay close attention to the performance of our retailers year over year. In particular, we look at how the same stores revenue changes. So far, 2011 has been a banner year, with paid search growth averaging 39% and some verticals seeing more than double that growth. Since we expect this to continue through the holidays, this means adjusting budgets, keyword bids and inventory stock levels with this growth in mind.

Make changes in anticipation of growth, rather than in reaction to it. 

Of course, every retailer is different, and our clients have benefited from our technology and services helping them achieve this impressive growth. But if you are not seeing growth then you should be taking a hard look at your paid search strategy and making adjustments now.
Not all retailers or verticals see a huge spike in sales during the holidays, but for those that do, growth is rapid and strong. In the table above you can see the kinds of typical growth from early October to the peak week in December.

Use your actual growth this year and then you can use this table, or last year's metrics, to set budgets and revenue goals. Look at last year's ROI, and review which promotions worked best. Keep an eye on key dates, or better yet, put them on a calendar, so you are preparing for Black Friday well ahead of time. Do you know which products or product categories were hot? If so, can you predict what will sell this year? Look to products that are frequently given as gifts, are holiday related or are used in winter. 

Over the coming months, we'll cover more strategies and tips for making the most of this growth, and for continued success in the holidays.

 

 

 

Written by Jason James, Paid Search Product Manager   

 

Google Hates Your New Ads

Alright, so maybe that’s a bit much. Google doesn’t hate your new ads, it just doesn’t know them yet. I’m sure once they spend some time together they’ll get along just fine. Allow me to explain.    

New ads have no history by which Google can judge them, so they often show lower than existing ads and have a worse click through rate as a result. If they replace an ad that has performed well for a long period of time, they won’t enjoy the same benefits until they earn them with their performance. You and I may know that they are a newer, better ad, but Google’s not going to reward them with higher ranks until it sees some data on them.

This is seen most obviously in top box placement. If an existing ad consistently shows in the top box, a new ad that replaces it will typically show in the side bar for at least a few hours, if not days. Position (and especially top box placement) has a much stronger effect on click through rate than promotional language, so you can lose a lot of traffic even with a strong promotion.

This is an important effect to take into consideration for any paid search account, but especially for ecommerce accounts that use their ads to highlight frequently changing promotions. It would seem to be common sense that replacing normal ad copy with promotional copy when a sale starts is a best practice, but it’s actually more complicated than that.  Every now and then a perfect storm of conditions comes together in a paid search account to dramatically illustrate an effect that is usually more subtle, and a recent experience with a new client illustrates what can go wrong if promotional ads are rolled out without regard to how Google views new ads.

This client had a weekend sale that was set to run Friday to Monday, so on Thursday night, we uploaded the promotional ads as paused. On Friday, we switched on the new ads, switched off the normal ads, and were ready to go! The next week when we dug into the data to see how the sale had performed, we were happy to see that the sale had strongly increased conversion rates:

But somehow revenue dropped off at the same time before coming back in a big way on Sunday:

Ouch. So what happened there? Basically, when we launched the new ads, they didn’t have the history to qualify for their normal positions in the top 3 spots. They were all showing lower than usual and, on some queries, in the sidebar. This is pretty typical, but new ads will generally bounce back into the top spots after a couple hours, so it’s not something that normally has this big of an impact on performance.

However, in this case, our client is a manufacturer that has strong competition from its resellers, who are allowed to bid on its brand terms. With so much strong competition on our brand terms, once we dropped out of the top spots it took us almost two days to get back to where we were before launching the sale copy:

With the lower rank, our CTR’s suffered big time, basically being cut in half before returning to normal after two days:

That explains how we lost revenue despite our high conversions rates. Once we got customers to the site, they converted well. Unfortunately, our lower rankings kept us from getting our normal click through rates, so traffic dropped, bringing revenue with it. Once our ranks came back to normal levels, revenue bounced back and finished the weekend strong, so while the promotion wasn’t all bad, we could have done better.

So what does this mean for you? For most accounts, this will mainly be a problem on non-brand campaigns. Most brand campaigns don’t have the level of competition on them that this client does, so they will bounce back into the top spot pretty quickly after an ad change. When results are viewed at the account level, this will cover up any problems with the non-brand terms. If you do a lot of promotions, take a look back at your top performing non-brand campaigns during those promotions to see how this effect may have impacted your performance.

Now, let me be clear, I'm not suggesting that you stop launching new ads, but it is important to launch them in a way that will avoid any disruption to your account. With Q4 and its abundance of promotional ad opportunities just around the corner, you can make sure you’re maximizing your performance with these best practices:

1. Don’t Change Ads on the Fly:  If you’re tempted to take your existing copy and just switch out a line or two of text for the promotion- don’t. It’s much better to create new ads and upload them as paused before the promotion. This way, you know your ads are in the system and through the approval process. Plus, when the sale is over, you can revert back to your normal ads and they won’t be “new”.

2. Reuse Promotions: If you tend to use the same promotions over and over, create ads for them that are seasonally neutral, keep them in your account as paused, and reuse them as needed. Sure, it may be tempting to create a President’s Day free shipping ad, a Spring Sale Free Shipping ad, and a Memorial Day free shipping ad, but what’s important in those messages is the Sale itself. Create a generic ad that you can reuse for all three and you’ll benefit from not having to start from scratch each time.

3. Rotate Sale Ads with Normal Ads Initally: For this sale, we turned off all the regular ads once the sale ads were up. Next time, we can mitigate some of the rank drop by letting our normal ads continue to run with the sale ads for the first day or two.

4. Use Longer Promotions:  We were lucky we had four days on this promotion to recover from the first two, but had it been shorter we would have been in trouble (and we could’ve benefited from an extra day or two). This is especially important to keep in mind for the Black Friday - Cyber Monday stretch when many people roll out Black Friday ads for a day, switch to normal ads for the weekend, and then roll out Cyber Monday ads for a day. Had we tried that with this client, we would have completely missed out on the best days of the year. Instead, we’ll be prepared with Holiday Sale or maybe Cyber Five language that we can keep up for the whole period.

5. Raise Bids When Promos Launch: A good sale should improve conversion rates, so raising your bids can help you drive more traffic and overcome any rank drop from the new ads.

Most importantly, remember that “common sense” can get you in trouble when it comes to pay per click advertising if it doesn’t take into account the nuances of how the engines work. In this case, rolling out promotional copy for our sale seemed like a no-brainer, but we actually ended up hurting our performance.  With these tips, you can be sure that you are getting the most out of your promotions.

Written by Kevin Hill, Senior Paid Search Campaign Manager

Webinar Preview: Push Up Your Paid Search This Holiday Season

We are putting the finishing touches on our slides, polishing up our presentations skills, and donning our funny red hats for the Holiday Boot Camp webinar series that starts next week. I'm first up with a presentation focusing on paid search marketing on Wednesday, Aug. 10th at 2PM Eastern.

The main focus will be a set of proven strategies for maximum sales. In addition, we will be reviewing the 2010 holiday season and what it meant for e-commerce. And finally, we'll present a calendar of important dates so you can stay on track once things get really hectic.

I'm really pleased with the content and I think you will be too; I got a lot of help from ChannelAdvisor's world class campaign managers, the folks who manage paid search campaigns daily for our clients large and small, and there are great ideas for both new search marketers and seasoned pros.

Is it too early to be planning for the holidays? I don't think so, not when there is so much at stake. I took a look at the change in performance across our client portfolio from October to December of last year, and the numbers are staggering: clicks went up 103% while revenue tripled. And nevertheless, our clients saw a 50% improvement in their ROI.

Please join us next week for an informative hour of tactics and strategies for success this holiday season!

 

Written by Jason James, Paid Search Product Manager   

Google Weighs In: Should You Bid on Your Own Brand Name?

Many advertisers just don't understand why they should pay good money for clicks when search engines deliver traffic for free in the organic search results. It seems obvious: you're #1 in the organic search results, so why should you pay for an ad? Nevertheless, studies that ChannelAdvisor has done numerous times (and written about on this blog) confirm that bidding on your brand term results in greater revenue and more profit. Now, a new study from Google lends additional support to this still-controversial topic. In this post, I'm going to share the data we've collected, provide a process for conducting your own test, and discuss Google's results.

 

The Big G Studies Paid Search Lift

Now despite the fact the report is from Google, we've found that analysis from Google Chief Economist Hal Varian and his team to be of high quality. In a detailed report covering six months of data and 400 studies, Google statisticians found that 89% of clicks from paid search would not go to the organic results for the same advertiser. Seems pretty cut and dry, right? Well, not quite, as the lift varied with the ranking of the organic results. The higher the organic ranking, the less lift from the paid search ads.  Google concedes, "Organic results triggered by branded search terms tend to have a higher ranking on average and this may lead to a low [incremental click benefit]. However, a low [incremental click] value is not necessarily a deterrent to investing in search advertising." We agree, but then the question is left unanswered: should you bid on your own brand name?

 

The Test

To answer this question definitively, do a real world experiment. Simply put, turn off the ads and measure the results. If total revenue and profit go down, the argument is settled. For additional confidence in the test results, run the ads on a staggered schedule to minimize the impact of seasonality or other changing conditions. 

After the first week with the ads off, check to see if you have enough data. It may be you need to lengthen the test period. As in any testing, the more data, the more confidence in the conclusions. When you look at the results, focus on the total profit. In one test we did, the total revenue increased 10-18% with the ads running, and the incremental revenue came at a very healthy ROI of 1000% or higher.

 

Brand and Non-Brand

Finally, this same testing process can be applied to non-brand terms as well. Perhaps years of search engine optimization has rewarded you with a number one rank for some of your best selling products or product categories. Try pausing the ads for one or a couple of these terms and see for yourself that the paid search ads pay for themselves. 

Why does this work? The answer isn't entirely clear, but there is an old idea in marketing that buyers need multiple touches before they will buy something. Perhaps the two links to your site, paid and organic, even though they are on the same page, work in the same way as multiple touches. Or perhaps the more controlled marketing message in the paid search ad is ultimately more compelling than the natural listing, where it's harder to introduce promotional or seasonal messaging.

 

Caveat Lector

After all this, you may not actually want to perform this test yourself: turning off your search ads will likely lower your sales! Try this test if you need to be sure or if you have good reason to believe these results won't apply to your business. Keep an eye on the results, and if sales are going down, you may just want to end the test early.

 

More Information

If you're interested in learning more, here are several other articles to look at:

ChannelAdvisor: The Value of Bidding on Brand Terms in Paid Search

Google Research: Studies Show Search Ads Drive 89% Incremental Traffic

Search Engine Land: Should You Bid On A Keyword If You Rank Organically For That Term?

 

Written by Jason James, Paid Search Product Manager